Dmitri Sklyarov rarely reads electronic books.
"There are almost no e-books in Russian," said Sklyarov, the 26-year-old Moscow cryptographer who was arrested in Las Vegas last month under a 1998 digital copyright law.
"I prefer paper books," he said. "They're much easier to carry with me, and can be read anywhere."
In fact, most people still prefer paper books. Unlike music and film, books have yet to be popularly accepted in digital format. Nevertheless, the nascent market has heightened the publishing industry's sensitivity to the potential for digital piracy, enough so that it has initiated the first criminal case under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. And Sklyarov is the first to be charged.
Sklyarov, who is free on bail in northern California, was charged with trafficking of a program that decrypts Adobe Systems' software for electronic books, allowing them to be copied.
The lanky, mild-mannered father of two spoke about the case, and his path to a career in cryptography, in an interview last Friday, four days after he was released from a jail in San Jose, California.
Sklyarov was arrested at Def Con, a conference for hackers, on July 16, the day after he had given a presentation on electronic book security to an audience of several hundred. As he was preparing to check out of the Alexis Park Hotel to go to the airport, FBI agents told him and a co-worker to put their hands on the wall. According to a statement by the co-worker, Sklyarov laughed, thinking the agents were part of a bad joke, since the presence of federal agents is a long-running theme at the counterculture Def Con convention.
He spent three weeks in jail as he was being transferred from Las Vegas to Oklahoma City to San Jose, where Adobe has its headquarters.
"I can't say I was depressed or panicked," he said on Friday. "I was curious that I was in such a situation, because I never considered I would be in jail in any time of my life."
He did say he misses his wife, Oksana, and his two children, ages 2 and 4 months. "My children both are very little," he said. "I don't know if they understand what happened."
Released on US$50,000 bond on Monday, Sklyarov, as a condition of his release, went to live in Cupertino with Serguei Osokine, a Russian-American software engineer who agreed to be Sklyarov's custodian. Other conditions include limiting travel to the northern district of California and checking in with a court monitor.
His next court hearing is scheduled for Aug. 23.
For the time being, he spends most of his time meeting with his lawyers.
At his lawyer's a office in San Francisco on Friday, Sklyarov was prevented from discussing the specifics of the arrest or his work at ElcomSoft, his employer in Moscow where he has worked for over a year. But he did speak of his life in Russia.
He said has long been interested in math, computers and cryptography. He was born in Moscow in 1974 to two computer engineers and studied math intensively in high school before attending Bauman Moscow State Technical University.
His work on electronic book security started as an academic interest that was a result of the process of elimination. DVDs, a much more popular digital medium that has also attracted the attention of cryptographers, would seem a more obvious candidate for security research. But e-books were easier to obtain in Russia.
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